by Aiden James
“Actually, maybe a lighter wine would be better,” I said, thinking that merlot at this castle would come from Racco’s private stock, which would make me think of him all the more. “Do you have something simple, like maybe zinfandel?”
“I believe so…. Mercel?”
Racco’s trusted assistant appeared, stepping around a bar nearby. I hadn’t noticed his presence, but seeing him now made me feel better about things…better about Racco’s absence. Maybe things would be okay after all, for both of us. At least that’s what I took from Mercel’s warm smile and carefree gait as he approached the table.
“A glass of the finest zinfandel for the lady in honor,” said Gustav.
“Yes, I shall pour her a glass and bring it over.”
He bowed to us both and hurried back to the bar. He returned a moment later with my preferred beverage for the evening.
“Would you enjoy a salad with your dinner?” Gustav asked me, after waving off Mercel’s offer to prepare an RH negative cocktail for him, apparently his usual preference.
“No, I’m fine,” I said, between bites of what I assumed was chicken. Either that or the biggest Cornish hen I’d ever seen. It was excellent, as was the wine—obviously another cherished bottle from Racco’s collection. “This is quite good.”
“Excellent!” he beamed.
He turned his attention to the party around us while I ate. As the night before, the vampires feasted on blood at room temperature from several vats nearby and an extra two punchbowls on the table. Meanwhile, I caught Chanson studying me from her corner of the room. Wearing a slight smile on her face, I assumed she might suddenly appear before me. But for the time being she remained where she was, and soon returned to her conversation with Raquel and Nora. Armando had disappeared, and when I looked over at Garvan and Franz, who had joined a group of females dressed in early Renaissance Italian attire, he wasn’t with them either.
Perhaps to distract me from my Racco quest, Gustav engaged me in conversation. I thought it might be painful, given my initial impressions of him the night before. Pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn’t, we talked about my aborted studies in America and what life was like growing up in Virginia. It wasn’t until he signaled to the rest of the room that he had an important announcement to make, I realized he had expertly gotten me to talk about myself, and yet, said nothing about him. I couldn’t decide if that was a good thing, or not.
The room grew quiet, as Gustav rose from his throne. At the moment, he was the only one floating in the room, as the others either gathered in small groups or took a seat at the table. I wondered if the groups represented some sort of geographical separation. I doubted seriously that all of them originated from France, or even resided here on a full-time basis. Hearing the variety of dialects and accents around me during the past two nights supported this notion.
Racco stood just inside the doorway, dressed in the same Body Armor, I assumed, and wearing a casual beige dress coat and jeans. I think I said before that it wouldn’t matter how the man dressed, as he is always gorgeous. But, either he didn’t see me—or worse—chose not to acknowledge my presence next to the throne. I wanted to go to him and say something… to find some way to reconnect. However, Gustav had already begun to address his flock.
“My brothers and sisters, compatriots of the dark gift we’ve shared freely for so many centuries. As you all know, our way of life—the manner in which we have ruled this continent and the very world—is now threatened in ways unseen before….”
I tried to take it all in, and to do so seriously, praying to God that my irreverent thoughts would somehow go undetected by the undead throng gathered around me. I definitely didn’t want Gustav to gain any telepathic inkling as to what I thought about the grandiose manner in which he addressed the crowd of vampires gathered in the dining hall. Hell, if his flamboyant cap had covered his eyes, it would seem as if the Ku Klux Klan’s Grand Dragon spoke instead. That thought brought a wry smile to my face, which I’m sure someone would’ve noticed.
But, he continued on undeterred. I caught most of what he said, and the important thing was that the castle would soon be under siege. When he mentioned the name ‘Ralu’, though, I went from an irreverent observer to fully engaged believer. He had my rapt attention from that point forward.
“So, Ralu is the one behind the uprisings taking place throughout Europe?”
The question was posed by a stately gentleman sitting in a chair near where Racco stood. Undoubtedly an older vampire, and one turned to darkness later in life, his long white hair and youthful features reminded me of Nora. The entire room turned to look in his direction until Gustav answered him.
“Yes, Kazikli, it is him,” confirmed Gustav, his tone solemn. “He has reassembled an army in the old country—yours and my former home. A new version of Diavolului Respinge has risen from the depths of the earth, where we sent them to live out their miserable existence almost three hundred years ago.”
“But, how can the ‘Devil’s Rejects’ become formidable so quickly?” asked another vampire, this one much younger. From the disdainful looks from several others near him, it appeared he wasn’t held in high esteem.
“They have figured out how to proliferate,” Gustav replied, and the underlying tone seemed benevolent—different than I would’ve expected, given my intuitions about him. My volleying respect jumped back up a notch. “It is no longer an intelligent Ralu leading a bunch of imbeciles. They are no longer far beneath us…they have learned to procure the living for food and to build their numbers. They now easily assimilate knowledge, where as you know, they once were half-wits easily routed by farmers armed with clubs and pitchforks. They no longer make the same mistake twice….”
He grew quiet, and then glided through the air until he reached the middle of the room. Still hovering above the table, all eyes remained upon him, all of us waiting expectantly for him to continue.
“Their army now exceeds thirty-two thousand,” he advised, once ready to speak again. “Most are here in Europe, although as you shall see in a moment, their presence is known throughout the world. As a result, we are all in danger—them and us. The world’s powers have turned a deaf ear to my voice, and will seek to destroy us all unless Ralu is stopped.”
“How can we do that if he has amassed an army as intelligent as you claim they are?” said the vampire Kazikli, rising to his feet. Definitely the most regal vamp that night in terms of dress, he tapped his gold-tipped cane on the floor, sending forth streams of purple plasma light from the point of impact. “We number only four-hundred and seventy-eight—nearly half of whom are gathered here tonight! They will cut us down like wounded flies if we chase them through the chasms, and might not fare any better if we await their attack on your ‘Le château de douleur’!”
The vampire glared in anger at his king, although the way these two conversed made it obvious to me that they had been colleagues in the blood drinking biz for many centuries.
“I know Ralu…better than any of you,” said Gustav, finally, after nearly a minute spent in thoughtful silence. “If we perform the ceremony…the Relance de sang, before his Romanian army storms the castle, he will back off. He wants the gift, just as we do, if for no other reason than to keep us from using it.”
“None of us want to perish, oh King,” said a woman in the back, who turned out to be Nora once she stood. “What must we do?”
Could she have been any more obvious in her set up for Gustav to close the deal here?
“You…all of you need to remain here in support, and do whatever it takes to hold his army out of the castle’s passages,” he said, and the confident smile on his face reeked of a ‘Tony Robbins breakthrough’. “We must hold them out until Txema conceives a child.”
Huh??
They all looked at me—whether vampire, slicing-meat servant girl, bartender, or lord of the manor. I could feel self-conscious heat rush to my face, but I also felt indignant. I wanted to tell them that
in addition to the fact I wasn’t about to be some frigging surrogate mom for whatever bloodlust ceremony they’d concoct, I couldn’t do it. Not even if I wanted to. I suffer from a rare disorder called Stein Levanthal Syndrome, which has made me sterile since the onset of my adolescence.
I hated the way Gustav studied me—obviously reading my thoughts and then smiling anyway. He nodded his head, as if he not only read the words but also heard the panicked voice shouting defiantly in my head.
“Look, Txema, at the television…see what is happening right now around the world!”
He pointed a remote control toward the wall behind me, where two dark curtains separated to reveal what resembled a ‘jumbo-tron’ from a sports auditorium. The plasma screen took up the entire wall on that side of the room—more than a hundred feet wide and roughly forty feet tall.
“We will start in your country, America,” he advised. “Here is the latest update from CNN.”
Immediately, a blonde newswoman appeared on the screen, with a ‘Mysterious Mauling Deaths’ headline behind her. Reporting on the latest incident in a string of more than forty deaths across the United States, she commented on how the ‘crisis’ had grown steadily worse since late last week. She closed her update, stating “authorities are no longer ruling out the possibility that a bigger, more violent strain of the Chupacabras phenomenon is responsible for the killings.”
“To save time, I can assure you that similar violence against your fellow humans is taking place from Shanghai to Moscow, and from London to Milan,” said Gustav, pointing the remote again toward the screen. “Here is tonight’s report from Paris, detailing attacks from early this morning near Perpignan.”
Luckily, he changed the format to allow for an English translation to appear at the bottom of the screen. As I’ve said, my French isn’t so good—especially listening to some excited French lady fly through her report. Then again, the graphic description of what happened to the nine victims might’ve sat better with my churning stomach if caught in bits and pieces from the Bridgette-lady’s flowery dialect.
“You can stop all of this, Txema,” Gustav advised, after turning off the giant screen TV. He let out a very deep sigh before continuing. “Ralu will only stop his aggression once he knows you are with child. You are fully aware that he has access to your thoughts as well as your location. If you do not agree to help us, we may not be able to save you from him. We can only run for so long before he will track us down.”
An icy chill raced down my spine as he said this…nearly the same exact words Ralu uttered to me, in my dreams of him. Still, how in the hell could I become pregnant? The vampires possessed some pretty amazing powers, but I sincerely doubted creating a virgin-like birth was one of them.
“I wish I could help you,” I said, sort of true—mostly not. “But I can’t get pregnant. I have Stein Levanthal Syndrome.”
I paused to make sure he had a chance to absorb what I just told him. For the uninformed, I do produce eggs in my ovaries, but the follicles that move them out into my womb? Well, for me, they don’t exist. An ovum from me has no more chance of getting fertilized than a polar bear finding ice in Ecuador.
“And, so do I,” said a voice from the back of the room. Suddenly, Chanson transported herself to the right side of Gustav. She bowed respectively, the edge of her cream flamenco dress nearly dipping into a blood-filled punch bowl. “We all have the same condition, Txema—all of us who bear the birthmark. When Relance de sang is performed, you will become fertile for a short window of time. An egg will be released into your womb, ready to be fertilized.”
She smiled lovingly, which made me feel better about what happened earlier that day. However, I remained unconvinced my infertile womb could suddenly become whole again—even if for the moment in time she described.
“Trust me, Txema….the ceremony was once used with me—almost three hundred years ago when I was still human,” she added, and in the next instant, she stood next to me. Yeah, that freaked me out—it probably always will. “It is the only way to save our kind—your kind. You may not ever choose to be a vampire, but this is something you can do that serves both vampires and the human race. Our collective survival is dependent on what you choose. ”
Her tone was extremely soothing…. I wondered if she was trying to ‘glamour’ me, like I once saw the vampires in True Blood do to people they sought to control.
“How does it happen?” I asked, wishing badly that there was some other way to fix their problem. I believe it was one of the few times I hated having the damned birthmark. The first time since my sophomore year in high school, where two bitches teased me on picture day, and I ended up frowning for the photographer. The marks are hardly noticeable in that picture, but the unflattering scowl on my face remains.
“A vampire must drink your blood while you copulate with a man.”
Chanson shot Garvan a dirty look; I’m sure for the lack of tact in spelling out what the ceremony is all about, rather than the upstage.
“It’s not as bad as he makes it out to be,” she assured me, pausing to shoot him another glare. He looked away, perhaps in embarrassment or anger—no doubt worsened by the look of disdain he also received from Gustav. He zipped back into the crowd. “It can be any vampire to make it happen, but you have a choice as to which vampire accompanies you into darkness. The vampire needs to drain enough blood to bring your vital signs down low enough for your body to drop the egg. Once conception occurs, which the vampire will know, then you will be brought back. Your complete recovery will be swift.”
It sounded just lovely. I wasn’t at all thrilled about being drained to the point of near-death, which engendered many more questions. Not to mention, while this blood draining was going on somehow I had to participate in having sex with somebody. I briefly wondered if we could opt for a quick little test-tube baby option.
“No,” said Chanson, interrupting my thoughts. “It has to happen where the blood draining and conception happen simultaneously.
Okay, so they weren’t going to give this up. Even as I surveyed the room, my gaze encountered unanimous nods, the most enthusiastic ones from Gustav and my long lost cousin.
I suddenly thought of one positive thing…. Could I pick the guy, and could it be Racco? Recalling how enraptured I felt by his touch, maybe he could make love to me in such a way that I wasn’t even aware of the vampire’s fangs attached to my neck, like some overgrown tic or parasite. But, could even he get past that imagery? Being a vampire’s buddy and all, I wondered if he’d been asked to do this sort of thing at some point in the past.
“He’s not an option,” Gustav advised, making this whole voyeur in my head thing that much worse. I bet all of them were peeking at my thoughts right then.
“Who is not an option?”
Racco stood and came toward me, and all of the vampires turned toward his voice.
“You are not a viable option, and you know why this is true,” Gustav replied, his tone even. I could sense anger building within the oldest vampire.
“Things are different now,” said Racco, his sultry tone pulling on my heart again. “It is not like it was—“
“It would be exactly as it was!” interrupted Chanson. “Your blood is different …you are not human, anymore than we are. Should I tell her about Marissa? Hmmm?? Better yet, maybe I should take her to see Marissa!”
“No…you do not need to do that,” he said, before turning to walk away.
His shoulders sagged. I could tell this other girl’s name greatly saddened him. I wanted to run over to him and throw my arms around him, so much more than I wanted to find out who Marissa is.
Before I could pursue either idea, I heard a man screaming. No, that’s not entirely accurate. I first heard the doors to the main entrance groan as they were forced open and then I heard the screams.
“Get your fucking hands off me, you goddamned blood sucker!!”
Oh my God…I recognized the voice.
“…
My dad’s a powerful attorney, and he’s gonna sue your ass—he’ll make you…Txema? Is it really YOU?? What in the hell’s going on here???”
Peter…my boyfriend’s back. Somehow, someway he was in France. In France and not at all happy about it. He swung in vain, trying to punch Armando, who easily held him in check.
Meanwhile, I felt an incredible surge of happiness flow through me. Despite his flushed face and roughed up appearance, I was exceedingly happy to see him. Much happier than I would’ve ever dreamed of being—especially after my recent escapades with Racco. Yes, I felt the pangs of guilt, and knew I would have to come to terms with what I had pursued with Racco, and what I had left with Peter. But, this wasn’t that time.
“Peter!!” I shouted, and ran over to him. Armando let him go, and I threw my arms around his neck. I prepared to say something…something about missing him so much, and about love. But, all I could do was cry while he held me tight.
When I calmed down enough to talk, I asked him what he was doing here.
“That Armando sucker and the dude with him took me from campus a few days after you disappeared,” he explained, pausing to look around the room. The expression on his bruised face told me that he had hardly noticed the two hundred vampires staring at him until that very moment. “They’ve been keeping me in some fucking dungeon here, after telling me that they needed to keep me prisoner for my protection.”
I could only imagine what his incarceration had been like as compared to mine. He definitely wasn’t treated like a princess on an expensive yacht. In addition to the bruises, the leaves and straw stuck in his hair and the mud stains on his trousers confirmed as much.
“How is Tyreen?” I asked him, thinking this wouldn’t be the time to discuss the obvious reason he was brought here, to mate with me. It seemed so obvious, although I could pretty much guarantee it would take hours—maybe even days and weeks—to get him to buy into the idea, despite his love for me. “Is she okay? What about Johnny, too?”
